Marina Abramovic on Money, Boob Jobs

There is a surprisingly candid (and unfortunately short) interview with Marina Abramovic in TheNew York Times Magazine today. Here, we learn that Ms. Abramovic believes MoMA didn’t pay her enough for her blockbuster “Artist Is Present” show at the museum in 2010 (“I was paid an honorarium of exactly $100,000…they completely ran over me”) and that James Westcott, Ms. Abramovic’s former assistant and the author of the excellent biography When Marina Abramovic Dies, is a “good writer, worst assistant. He filed all the files upside down.”

There’s also this exchange:

Not long after you and your lover and collaborator, Ulay, broke up in 1988, you got a breast enlargement, which some found to be anathema to the feminist tradition of performance art.

I don’t care. You know, I was 40 years old. I heard that Ulay made pregnant his 25-year-old translator. I was desperate. I felt fat, ugly and unwanted, and this made a huge difference in my life. Why not use technology if you can, if it can build your spirit? And I’m not feminist, by the way. I am just an artist.